As a rhetorician and teacher of composition, I am concerned about the fate of public
discourse; I am concerned about the relevance of rhetorical studies for our students and our
world. This concern has led me to look to the conditions of possibility for public discourse,
conditions that I am increasingly discerning in the realms of architecture, city planning, and
public policy, and in the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. As a result of ten years of
Service Learning teaching and a semester long sabbatical in Los Angeles's Skid Row, I have
begun to take seriously the rhetorical nature of our built environment and the need to actively
engage our situatedness in material, physical place. For me, this has become my ethical
obligation as a rhetorician and teacher.

My response to questions of the relationship between composition and rhetoric
always includes reference to John Trimbur's exchange with Maxine Hairston in 1993 in which
he argued that rhetoric and the rhetorical teaching of composition is primarily about participation
in civic discourse and democracy. His comments became a benchmark for my own teaching and
opened a way for me to bring my classroom alive, to motivate myself and my students to
conceive of writing as action, to consider rhetorical composition a vital force in public life. The
Hairston-Trimbur exchange was fundamentally concerned with the nature of the place of
composition: Hairston arguing for a protected, safe place for student exploration and
experimentation, and Trimbur arguing that rhetoric called us out of place, out of our comfortable
academic space, and into the world of conflict and action.

This "Trimbur orientation" helps explain my response to Susan Jarrett's piece in the
first edition of this special double issue of Enculturation. In her efforts to locate
rhetoric, to show it alive and well, she first leaves the university and goes out into public
discourse where she demonstrates that there is indeed a whole lot of rhetoric going on. Her
doubts grow as she makes the turn back into academia, into English departments, into writing
programs, and perhaps that is why she ends before going into class. I, too, want to find it in
class, but end up going out. I'm beginning to think that's just what rhetoric does: it's always on
the move, always out and about, which is perhaps why Plato takes Socrates outside the city walls
for his conversation with Phaedrus.

Underlying my teaching is a strong belief in the power of public discourse; I have
staked my teaching of writing on the power of rhetoric to change our world. But, along with
many other rhetoricians, I have been concerned over the apparent erosion of public discourse; the
degeneration of rhetoric into pitched battles between entrenched opponents; and the general
sense of resignation to the inevitability of things as they are. I have been frustrated with the
decreasing quality of life of the middle class, the growing gap between rich and poor, the squalor
of urban centers, the decay in both quantity and quality of our public spaces, and the decline of
physical beauty in our architectural environment. And perhaps most frustrating of all, I have
been increasingly pessimistic about the ability of my teaching and scholarship to positively
impact these and other issues that we care deeply about.

My teaching of composition as civic discourse led me to Service Learning. The work
I have done with my students has been rewarding for both them and myself, yet a feeling that my
rhetoric and my teaching were disconnected and largely irrelevant nagged me. My hands still
were not dirty enough; I hadn't fulfilled the potential I had found in Trimbur's words. Or
perhaps I hadn't done enough walking, mapping, and dwelling, spatial practices through which
Nedra Reynolds seeks to develop "geographical rhetorics." Her work encourages me to connect
back to composition studies all the walking I've been doing in the streets of downtown LA over
the past year.

Reynolds begins her Geographies of Writing with a retelling of the
Phaedrus that dwells on Socrates' movement from his usual haunts in Athens to a place
outside the city walls. The unusual setting for this dialogue, she suggests, illustrates the role of
place in persuasion, argument, and learning. She argues that composition studies needs writing
theories that engage with metaphorical ways to imagine space without ignoring actual places and
spaces (3). Reynolds attempts to found new metaphors for writing based on geography and
place, inviting us to think of discourses as places to inhabit. Through the spatial practices of
walking, mapping, and dwelling, derived from cultural geography, she develops "geographic
rhetorics informed by the material, the visual, and the everyday" (2). Geographic rhetorics need
a sense of place; Reynolds argues that "theories of writing should reflect a deeper understanding
of place defined by contestations and differences" (2). Her project is grounded in notions of
identity as positionality (the "acknowledgment that our own locations do much to determine our
ability to 'see'") and notions of persuading arising in ethos as dwelling and requiring
common ground (117).

However, as teachers of writing we increasingly find ourselves facing students with
whom we share little in common. How do we reach such students? Reynolds asserts that we can
find ways to bridge racial and socio-economic gaps in geographic metaphors. She suggests that
we all move through the world, traversing space and connecting with places; at the very least, we
share with students the space of the university campus. Understanding our movements through
places such as campus, as well as the encounters with difference they inevitably produce, gives
us common ground, we all participate in such movement in the course of our everyday lives (4).
Examining these movements rhetorically with students can establish a base of understanding of
the ways in which we imbue space with meanings. She argues that movement is essential to
learning and persuasion; Plato takes Socrates and Phaedrus outside their habitual haunts so that
Socrates may be more open to new ideas, more apt to be "moved." Dwelling is equally as
important; while persuasion requires reaching out across difference, writing is also situated
within a specific environment. Geographic rhetorics that examine metaphors for place and
envision "discourses as places to be inhabited" can help us negotiate encounters with difference
that are crucial for learning. Metaphors describing discourses as places of habitation may help
build common ground in rhetoric and composition classrooms. However, the loss of common
ground is a hallmark not only of our classrooms but of communities and cities as well.

As a result of my social concerns and my frustrations with an insulated academia, I
decided to spend my sabbatical during spring of 2004 in downtown Los Angeles working
(mostly "hanging out") among homeless people and advocates. Most of my time has been spent
with my neighborhood council's committee on poverty and homelessness, with a coalition of
activists working on a campaign against the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, and at
the Dome Village, a transitional
housing community. I became interested in the Dome Village ten years ago when I first met the
founder, homeless activist Ted Hayes, and learned of his innovative approach using a tribal
model, in which every member has a vital role in the functioning of the community, to foster
active citizenship among village residents.

Hayes developed the Dome Village model based on his experience with
Justiceville, a spontaneous gathering of people on Skid Row to form an encampment on a
vacant lot. In 1986, Hayes obtained a lease from the property owner for one dollar a month and
the people of Justiceville built homes, obtained portable toilets and established codes of conduct,
building a surrogate family of support. Under pressure from city officials, however, the property
owner ended the lease after only a few months, and the residents were evicted. After they
camped in various prominent locations across LA, including the lawn at City Hall, in an effort
to call attention to the problems of housing and homelessness, the ARCO Foundation made a
large grant to found a permanent location for the community. Located on the eastern edge of
downtown, in the shadow of a major north/south freeway, the Dome Village was finally erected
in 1993 on an abandoned parking lot. With the skyscrapers of Bunker Hill rising above them,
the white domes seem to spring up like mushrooms beneath tall trees. Hayes chose geodesic
domes for his villages after reading Buckminster Fuller and his prediction that domes would
house the world's population. Made of molded fiberglass in small sections, the domes can be
easily assembled by two people in about four hours for less then $2,000. The Dome Village is
comprised of about twelve dwelling domes; additional domes house bathrooms, a laundry,
offices, a community room, and kitchen facilities. However, according to Hayes, housing is but a
small part of the need of homeless people; the Dome Village aims to help residents learn to
function as members of a community by providing a measure of privacy, a basic human need,
as well as by requiring chore sharing and participation in community decision making. The
lesson from this "tribal" model is that the community functions well only when each member
performs his or her role. Residents pay one third of their income to live in the Village for up to
two years during which time they participate in community life, job training, or schooling,
working toward self-sufficiency and permanent housing. Case managers and a social worker
oversee their progress. It is the only shelter facility in Los Angeles that provides a private room,
allows couples and families to remain together, and accepts pets. Children and dogs, cats,
rabbits, and birds are cared for by the entire community. The waiting list for a dome is long.

The sense of place these men and women showed me resonates with the portrait
Mike Davis draws in "Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space." Davis argues
that LA is embroiled in "open social warfare that pits the interests of the middle class against the
welfare of the urban poor. In cities like Los Angeles, on the hard edge of postmodernity,
architecture and the police apparatus are being merged to an unprecedented degree" (155). He
juxtaposes the streets of Skid Row, where I spent my time, with the new downtown built on
Bunker Hill in the 1980s when the original city center was abandoned to Skid Row, describing its
lavish high-rises, plazas, and malls and the architectural and design practices that work to let the
homeless know they do not belong here. The spaces of the new downtown have abandoned the
streets and turned inward. "The universal consequence of the crusade to secure the city," Davis
claims, "is the destruction of any truly democratic urban space. The American city is being
systematically turned inward. The 'public' spaces of the new megastructures and supermalls
have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity" (155). He links the
eradication of true public space to security concerns and the "middle class demand for increased
spatial and social insulation" (156).

The fixation on security is one of the three characteristics Michael Sorkin attributes
to the "ageographical" city of postmodernity: 1) the "dissipation of all stable relations to local
physical and cultural geography," 2) and obsession with security, and 3) a preoccupation with
simulation, what he calls city as theme park. Disneyfication is a common charge against
contemporary places and cities, but Sorkin imbues it with high stakes. He argues that such a

happy regulated vision of pleasure . . . [acts] as a substitute for the democratic
public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting,
of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work. In the "public" spaces of
the theme park or the shopping mall, speech itself is restricted: there are no
demonstrations in Disneyland. The effort to reclaim the city is the struggle of
democracy itself. (xv)

Reynolds' streetwork charges us with the task of distinguishing such inauthentic places from
authentic places by walking the streets and learning to see (110). Drawing from the work of Jane
Jacobs, she describes redevelopment as a "relentless modern crusade against the street", and its
inhabitants, that stand in the way of progress (111).

Many critics of Disneyfied cities have voiced concern with the slick, ageographical
city devoid of true public space. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the architectural school
of New Urbanism. The New Urbanists might best be described by their refrain: "No more
housing subdivisions! No more shopping centers! No more office parks! No more highways!
Neighborhoods or nothing!" In their best-known manifesto, Suburban Nation, leading
New Urbanists Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck seem to hail their design solutions as a panacea
for a wide array of contemporary problems from economic segregation, the corporatization of
life, urban decay, and disaffected middle class youth, to the national obesity problem. One of
their more compelling claims is the lack of lifestyle choices offered in suburban America; the
only viable option in the suburbs is to "own a car and to need it for everything" (25).

Despite the grandiose nature of their claims, their founding assumption, "a shared
belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the
social health of families and the community at large", rings true. They argue:

Life once spent enjoying the richness of community has increasingly become life
spent alone behind the wheel. Lacking a physical framework conducive to public
discourse, our family and communal institutions struggle to persist in our
increasing sub-urban surroundings. And suburban growth seems to have also
drained much of the vitality from our inner cities, where a carless underclass finds
itself with diminishing access to jobs and services. (xiii)

Their notion of neighborhood is based on the distance a person can comfortably walk in five
minutes, roughly one-quarter mile, and they suggest that all the necessities of daily life,
including work, home, shopping, and civic institutions as well as a full array of housing types
and costs, should be accessible within that distance. This mixed-use arrangement puts a diverse
population in daily contact with one another, thus increasing the sense of shared fate across
racial, economic, and age differences. Our policies and interests shape our cities, they claim, and
our cities shape us (83).

The communities built under the auspices of the Congress for New Urbanism have their own problems. While
some planners insist upon inclusionary zoning (a certain percentage of housing designated as
affordable), most New Urbanist neighborhoods are upscale and exclusive. David Harvey, a
Marxist cultural geographer, considers New Urbanism as a materialization of a utopian vision
that, in the tradition of Lewis Mumford, considers the region as a whole, urban and suburban
areas working together with common resources, and recognizes its potentially revolutionary
force for change in suburban design. Its focus on communities and neighborhoods appeals to
many, yet the realization of these neighborhoods in built communities such as Kentlands and
Seaside tends to enforce conformity even as it praises diversity of use and lifestyles. As do most
utopian visions, based upon a desire for community in the face of social disorder, New Urbanism
falls prey to the darker side of community, fraught with control and exclusion. As Harvey
suggests, community often means enhancing privilege for the already privileged and leaving the
underprivileged to their own devices (240).

I would suggest that New Urbanism should not, however, be dismissed out of hand
on the basis of its current built communities, all designed by a tightly constructed set of highly
specific principles and overseen by a congress; there are valuable lessons to be learned from its
founding assumptions that can give rise to other creative visions. New Urbanism holds that the
nature of the built environment matters, to quality of life, to public discourse, to democracy,
that details from the width of streets and sidewalks, number of stories, and setback distance, to
location of porches affects the lives of residents in real and significant ways. My own place of
residence for the past fourteen years has served as a touchstone for my ideas of community and
confirms for me the potential of New Urbanist claims. I live in a 1940's style urban courtyard
located in a beachside neighborhood of Venice, CA. The five individual bungalows face a
central common yard and provide more privacy than a typical apartment complex; at the same
time, their tight proximity and shared public space encourage a certain level of familiarity and
intimacy. Courtyard neighbors often remain friends after moving out.[3] Within easy walking or biking distance
of my home are a pharmacy, world-class restaurants, a clinic, grocery stores, locally owned
markets, a homeless drop-in center, and an independent coffee shop; I know my neighbors well
and also know the local merchants and street folks.

While New Urbanists themselves have paid scant attention to urban cores and the
poor and near poor, I cannot help but also consider their argument compelling as I walk down
Skid Row or through the halls of a mission. These places are designed and constructed with
security and containment in mind. The official policy of LA toward the homeless is
"containment", to the ten square blocks of Skid Row that house the shelters and service
providers in what Hayes calls the "homeless industrial complex." The subculture of street life
that emerges here is stark. The homeless residents are heavily inscribed by the rhetoric of these
places; their days can be mapped by the timing of meals at the missions, the queue for the vans to
winter shelters, the sprinklers set to go off periodically during the night in Skid Row's only park.
While most residents of LA are unsure of the precise dimensions of Skid Row, those living
within its borders are well aware of the boundary lines; the police are quick to remind them.[4]

But the homeless are not the only ones experiencing a public policy of containment;
the working poor are increasingly locked into depressed areas through economic and market
forces. In Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century, Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom argue that rising economic segregation is the fundamental problem
for urban planning and public policy. Their heavily documented and tightly argued study
examines the state of American cities and concludes that only more regional approaches to
planning and government can satisfactorily address the increasing economic division between
rich and poor, city and suburb. Their central tenet is that "where we live makes a big difference
in the quality of our lives, and how the places in which we live function has a big impact on the
quality of our society" (1).

These places are, however, becoming more unequal. Working from the assumption
that democracy depends upon social cohesion, the belief that "in the long run, we are all in the
same boat," Dreier et al. see a potential for the "unwinding of American democracy" (19).
Increasing inequality suggests that we are in different boats, lifted by different tides, and thus it
threatens democracy by eating away at social cohesion. We lose our sense of being in the same
boat, or having common ground, in the vast differences of our experiences. This effect is further
exacerbated by the physical segregation of the poor and near poor into concentrated areas. In
this context, social and public policies, as well as economic forces, can have vastly different
effects on the rich and poor. "When the most negative impacts of economic change are confined
to the poor and near poor," they argue, "the main political effect may be growing middle-class
enmity or indifference toward the poor." The real danger sets in when these negative effects
spread to the working and middle classes (19).

Since the beginning of the post-WWII era and the 1950s, the nature of our architecture
and zoning laws have fostered the separation of the economic classes, destroyed open space, and
eroded the sense of community and care for the common good. In this climate, public discourse
degenerates into competitive clashes over resources pitting the suburbs against downtown, the
rich against the poor, drivers against bus riders.
Harvey notes in Spaces of Hope:

The rich form ghettoes of affluence (their 'bourgeois utopias') and undermine
concepts of citizenship, social belonging, and mutual support. Six million of
them in the US now live in gated communities as opposed to one million ten years
ago. And if communities are not gated, they are increasingly constructed on
exclusionary lines so that the levels of segregation (primarily by class but also
with a powerful racial thread) are worse now . . . than ever. (150)

Harvey argues that the direct effects of this polarization of rich from poor are "division and
fragmentation of the metropolitan space, a loss of sociality across diversity, and a localized
defensive posture towards the rest of the city that becomes politically fractious if not downright
dysfunctional" (152).

Suburban sprawl and concentrated poverty are indirectly related through zoning laws.
Suburbanites enact exclusionary zoning in order to avoid the negative effects of concentrated
poverty and guard against their primary fear: an influx of poor people, which would cause area
wide decline. These zoning laws foster suburban growth outward at low density and also confine
poor people to the urban core (53). Sprawl itself further fosters the concentration of poverty in
central cities through the car-dependent lifestyle it requires.

Coupled with federal policies that encourage suburban growth (e.g., FHA loans,
interstate highway funding, etc.) and the competitive relationship between suburbs and
downtown, zoning practices have also encouraged central cities to "specialize" in social services
for the poor, adding to the concentration of poverty. City officials exacerbate this situation by
relying on the growth of social services to provide jobs, build political support, and enhance their
budgets (176). Dreier et al. suggest that "although growing economic inequality is bad, it is
greatly worsened by growing economic segregation" (12); they conclude "we can never
adequately solve our national problem of growing inequality until we specifically confront its
spatial dimension" (228).

The spatial dimension of inequality is palpable in Los Angeles. We have officially
reached the limits of its geographical space, locked as we are between the mountains and the sea.
All space is rapidly becoming contested space in which rich and poor struggle for belonging. In
such liminal spaces of mixing it might be hoped that knowledge and thus understanding of
difference could take hold. However, as David Silbey argues in Geographies of
Exclusion, "Feelings of insecurity about territory, status and power where material rewards
are unevenly distributed and continually shifting over space encourage boundary erection and the
rejection of threatening difference" (69).

Dreier et al. maintain that "the trend in the spatial organization of American
metropolitan areas is not the simple result of individuals making choices in free markets. Rather,
federal and state policies have biased metropolitan development in favor of economic
segregation, concentrated urban poverty, and suburban sprawl" (1). If policy created the
situation, perhaps policy can alter it. Such a change will require geographic rhetorics and much
imagination. Toward this end David Harvey advocates a renewal of utopian dreaming.

Harvey argues that global income inequalities are causing large-scale environmental
devastation, cultural destruction, and the undermining of social cohesion (177). But hope is his
final word: "As we collectively produce our cities, so we collectively produce ourselves.
Projects concerning what we want our cities to be are, therefore, projects concerning human
possibilities, who we want, or, perhaps even more pertinently, who we do not want to become"
(159). Harvey encourages us to engage once again in imagining "utopias of spatial form," that
we inhabit the role of architect as one "deeply enmeshed . . . in the production and pursuit of
utopian ideals" and constantly struggle to open spaces of new possibilities for future forms of
social life (200).

The Dome Village has become one such "space of hope" for me. Its staff and
residents are struggling against the forces of concentrated poverty, the entrenched culture of
street life, the whims of HUD funding, city budget cuts, the criminalization of poverty, and the
revitalization of LA's downtown, in order to preserve the sense of place they have created. Their
utopian dream is to replicate their village for homeless people across the nation, villages that
open spaces beyond the suburban middle-class lifestyle increasingly out of reach for those on the
streets and the working poor and to provide private spaces for those without the economic means
to purchase them. I have begun to dream utopias with them.

I continue to hold fast to the notion that rhetoric is about situatedness, about context,
about living and moving in the agora. Such context once provided common ground, a place in
which to meet and struggle with the adjacent adversary, the one we had to live and work with in
order to get things done. However, we are increasingly a place-less people, living in
ageographical cities, utilizing "instruments of instant artificial adjacency [that] are rapidly
eviscerating historic politics of propinquity" (Sorkin xi). Place matters, and yet, we are trading
place for convenience, security, and the comfort of homogeneity. Increasing geographic
segregation, especially between rich and poor, of our cities, suburbs, and towns has eroded our
common ground. We have lost the sense that we are all in the same place, that we must struggle
together to understand and make decisions. The architecture of our cities works to render the
others invisible and therefore essentially non-existent, not at the table, not in the same room, not
a party to the conversation. This segregation erodes public discourse and is thus a significant
threat to democracy.

Through my walking, I have realized that rhetoricians must fight this segregation and
re-establish common ground. We need to work to make visible the other, not only in our texts,
but in actual places. We are not in a global village for we are not a tribe sharing place and
knowing one another. We are instead withdrawing into pseudo-tribal enclaves, protected, secure
locations from which we exclude, ignore, and criminalize others. Geographic rhetorics can seek
to understand the rhetoric of urban architecture and public policy, can question its assumptions
and intentions, can encourage students to analyze the places in which they live and study in order
to discover who these places are for, who they exclude, and how their prohibitions are
maintained in practice (Silbey x).

And so after a semester long sabbatical, I'm trying to go back to class, to take my
place, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Politics and economics have followed me home.
Under the corporate model of the university that reinforces the segregation of power and
knowledge, two sites of social action and hope on my campus, the Writing Center and Service
Learning, sites that fight against the solid boundaries of university locatedness, are now
targeted for reduction or elimination; they cost some money and generate no revenue. Perhaps
I'll become a real sophist and hit the streets for good, that seems to be the place my rhetoric is
leading.